Knitting. Quilting. Sewing. Motherhood. Cleaning. Just kidding about the cleaning.

Monday, January 10, 2011

We're Basted!

Basting is my least favorite part of the process. Maybe yours too. And what is the most elementary mistake? The most frustrating thing ever?

Cutting the batting without enough excess on all sides so that you get part of the quilt basted only to find out your batting is TOO SHORT!

All these years and quilts later, to make a mistake like that was frustrating. I thought I would save so much time by cutting the batting off the roll where I store it in the (dimly lit) attic, instead of bringing out into the house where I could actually see what I was doing. Heh.

Speaking of batting, I buy my batting by the roll from Quilter's Dream Cotton. I have used it for years and love it for art quilts and bed quilts. Especially for bed quilts, after the quilts get washed a zillion times and get super squishy.

However, I have recently started to notice that there are lots of new batting products on the market (since I had kids and got stuck in my 1999 time warp.) Last spring while I was at the AQS show in Paducah, I got sucked into the Pellon booth and a very nice salesman sold me on the cuddly-ness of bamboo. Seriously--how can one resist cuddly-ness? (Here's a link.) So I bought one to test, and it's been sitting around aging nicely for many months, and I am going to use it on my next quilt. (not the quilt above--which got the Quilter's Dream cotton--but scroll down for a sneak peek).

Has anybody used this? If so, please report.

Yep, I got this one basted too. Two basted quilts! Now I'm feeling virtuous! And I have several quilting days ahead of me. Yum.

Speaking of hunkering in for quilting, I think it has been a long time since I showed you my studio. In the past year it has undergone a little re-decoration.

It's gone from the baby stage (pack n play in the studio), to the toddler stage (buckets of Little People). Onto the next stage (bins of art supplies) and now I have drug in an old love seat and a rug, hoping to appeal to the "tween crowd". The rug really made a difference making it feel homier. I love having one or all of my little companions hunkered in with me. They are good company.

7 Comments:

My family still calls my sewing room *the clubhouse*, my husband's name for it when the kids were growing up because when he'd be looking for everyone, more often than not he'd find them hanging out there with me. :-) Good memories.

I feel your pain on the batting miscut. How often have we all made the mistake of forgetting *Measure twice, cut once*?

although I am so not a quilter per se (YET!), I have used bamboo batting exclusively (for coasters, placemats and coffee cozies) as I was never on the 1999 wave. I like it! not sure that was the expert input you were looking for. :)

Emily- I am off topic here but didn't see an email address for you. You once posted instructions on making wonderful receiving blankets for babies. I would love to find that again. If it's not too much trouble, would you let me know? Thanks, Judygussiejs@gmail.com